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The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

Muriel Rukeyser

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Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Process
Order
Form
Self
Done
Writing
Represents
Work
Poem
Make
Poet

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

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As we live our truths, we will communicate across all barriers, speaking for the sources of peace. Peace that is not lack of war, but fierce and positive.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Flight is intolerable contradiction.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals, water to sound, fire to form: life flickers uncounted into the supple arms of love.
Muriel Rukeyser
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I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
Muriel Rukeyser
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Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
Muriel Rukeyser
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What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
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One writes in order to feel.
Muriel Rukeyser
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In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.
Muriel Rukeyser
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The journey is my home.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
Muriel Rukeyser
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Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
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How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that to an adolescent was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?
Muriel Rukeyser
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Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
Muriel Rukeyser